“Force-multiplier” reporting capabilities—MightyHive went from producing one report per day to 15 reports for 15 different clients per day—an increase of nearly 225x in reporting capacity

Challenge

Programmatic advertising is a challenge for publishers and advertisers alike, because it radically changes the scale, speed, and reach with which advertising is bought and sold. As one of the largest media buyers on the DoubleClick stack, MightyHive needs to consume data related to billions of transactions per day across multiple systems.

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While MightyHive's programmatic campaign management and DoubleClick expertise fueled company growth, the volume of data became too much to manage in-house. In particular, massive impression-level DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) data transfer logs required essential MightyHive engineers to get “pulled off the line” from customer projects to manually process data.

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“Alongside military, scientific, and financial domains, digital advertising is one of the few industries with truly massive amounts of pertinent transactional data,” said Chris Martin, COO of MightyHive. “Programmatic advertising requires full stack visibility. That pushes data requirements for storing, normalizing and analyzing a lot of data from heterogeneous sources—if you're not already doing this as an advertiser, you could be paying a huge cost due to media inefficiencies.”

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With billions of impressions creating enormous data transfer log files from multiple systems, MightyHive was forced to expend valuable engineering resources for data extraction on an ad-hoc basis. This would consume one full-time engineer for as long as two days for a single report. “Even getting raw data was taking us eight hours for a single client,” said Lexi Viripaeff, VP of Engineering at MightyHive. “Normalizing this data was mind-numbing, error-prone work that was sapping the energy of my team, when what they are passionate about is experimenting with data to drive programmatic ad performance.”

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With the prospect of spending millions of dollars and unknown time to produce a system that could parse 100s of billions of transactions in aggregate, MightyHive reached out to Google's BigQuery team for advice. They referred them to Switchboard because of the company's deep expertise in leveraging big data for publishers and advertisers.

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“When we got the call from MightyHive we knew this was a challenge we could sink our teeth into,” said Ju-kay Kwek, CEO of Switchboard Software. “Enabling companies to focus on unique data-driven insights rather than distracting highly-skilled employees with bespoke data management. That's the problem my co-founder and I witnessed after launching BigQuery together at Google, and the reason we built Switchboard.”

Ad Yield | Audience Insights | Content Optimization

"We implemented Switchboard's platform to eliminate the cost and uncertainty of building complex data automation. Switchboard's Data Operations domain expertise allowed us to focus on what we do best, delivering great digital...products."

Solution

Switchboard has empowered MightyHive engineering leads, front-line analysts, account and product managers to isolate and study business variables such as behavioral traits, time of day and more with data flowing into BigQuery. Within BigQuery, they run powerful custom SQL queries and plug in Tableau dashboards against Switchboard served data. This approach slashes days and dollars from customer expenses. component of their platform because Switchboard offered deep integration with all of MighyHive's business-critical data streams. “If you're trying to do what Switchboard does on your own as an advertiser or publisher—you're doing it wrong,” said Chris. “It would have cost an estimated $400K+ and at least six months if we built this ourselves; not to mention maintenance and ownership costs.”

Switchboard's turnkey system was configured in just one day now, major programmatic data sources are automated and monitored constantly. A set of highly-enriched and analyzed data is then made available immediately for consumption by MightyHive teams. Pulled together continuously from massive ad servers, bid manager and programmatic exchange logs, the combined dataset reveals insights such as spend and bid patterns across multiple suppliers, transaction volumes compared across multiple audience segments, and time from initial impression to customer conversion. MightyHive now can conduct novel ad hoc analysis, research, and reporting on complex campaign and audience patterns that were “impossible” to look at previously.

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“Programmatic advertising at its simplest form is a multivariate equation with three main inputs: creative, target audience, and inventory delivery parameters in a feedback loop,” said Chris. “If you don't understand the relationships, at scale, between these variables, you're flying blind.”

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“Switchboard enables MightyHive to provide both top-down and bottom-up benefits for customers. From the top, we improve ad effectiveness, and from the bottom, we reduce inefficiencies and attack fraud,” added Lexi Viripaeff, VP Engineering at MightyHive. “This lets us function as a programmatic intelligence backbone that produces digital marketing insights for our clients.”

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It would have cost an estimated $400K+ and at least six months if we built this ourselves; not to mention maintenance and ownerships costs.

— Chris Martin
VP of Digital @ MightyHive

Results

Switchboard has empowered MightyHive engineering leads, front-line analysts, account and product managers to isolate and study business variables such as behavioral traits, time of day and more with data flowing into BigQuery. Within BigQuery, they run powerful custom SQL queries and plug in Tableau dashboards against Switchboard served data. This approach slashes days and dollars from customer expenses.

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“A single client report used to take us days to produce. With Switchboard we can generate reports 15 times per day for 15 different clients—this is a force multiplier for us that is building customer loyalty for MightyHive,” said Chris. “I liken it to the invention of the electron microscope. Switchboard provides unparalleled magnification into advertising data that lets us see deeper into trends than we ever could before.

MightyHive went from producing one report per day to 15 reports for 15 different clients per day - an increase of nearly 225x in reporting capacity.

By using Switchboard to power MightyHive's proprietary programmatic advertising platform, the company has achieved three key business results:

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Improved Ad Performance: Switchboard delivers “force-multiplier” capability in terms of data aggregation and normalization. This empowers MightyHive to provide clients with granular data that optimizes ad spend in powerful new ways, such as improving bid/ask spread across programmatic campaigns, and increasing the accuracy of audience measurement. “In addition to helping us pinpoint hot and cold user trends, with data from Switchboard we now study complex affiliate marketing networks that were previously impossible to analyze,” said Lexi. “With verifiable conversion rates, our clients rapidly identify and eliminate under-performing channels then reinvest spend into channels with proven results.”

Accelerated R&D: Using Switchboard, MightyHive achieves rapid testing by leapfrogging ‘normal' times. Where it took one engineer days to manually generate a single R&D report, now as many as 15 different reports for 15 clients can be generated in a single day. “Data integration provides a common language to drive business results,” added Lexi. “We now map customer conversion rates across multiple exchanges against variables like cookie pools or differences between native and display ads. There's always another layer waiting for analysis if you care about maximizing performance.”

Campaign delivery dashboard showing city-level reach in real-time.

About MightyHive

MightyHive is the leading solution for programmatic advertising. Programmatic methods have already had a major influence on advertising, and it's still the early days. For example, IDC forecasts that programmatic TV spending, which includes digital display and video ad spending, which totaled approximately $988 million in 2016 and will increase to $11.5 billion in 2019, which will account for 13% of the total U.S. TV ad market. Over the next few years, keep your foot on the gas and hand on the wheel, and enjoy the ride.

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About Switchboard

Switchboard reveals real-time insights for digital media companies and advertisers by harnessing their data. From the team that launched Google BigQuery, Switchboard’s ready-made data unification platform turns disparate data into a single source of reliable, trustworthy information. Forward-looking teams from the Meredith Corporation, The Financial Times, Spotify and others have left behind outdated spreadsheets and custom engineering projects. Today, they rely on Switchboard to make confident decisions that engage audiences, optimize yield and spend, and grow revenue.